Monday, March 14, 2011

The X-Fire Game: SUB-stantial data for Rifting

I am going to state this now.

Rift will prove to be a MMO that can at least compete in this market without all of the issues exhibited by the previous years offerings.

All indications are leaning toward customer satisfaction (except for a few concerns, which as they appear, are squashed immediately) and at least a major amount of servers sticking around after the 30 day mark.

I have quite a few reams of data here, so lets get to the numbers...shall we?

Rift - 4968 ( OB 3962 ↑ )

EvE Online - 2090 (2073 ↑)

Lord of the Rings Online- 2003 ( 2108 ↓ )

Aion- 1995 ( 2047 ↓ )

Dungeons & Dragons Online - 415 ( 448 ↓ )

Star Trek Online- 350 ( 427 ↓ )

Champions Online - 349 ( 424 ↓ )

Age of Conan - 297 ( 253 ↑)

Warhammer Online - 178 ( 163 ↑ )

DC Universe - 100 ( 141 ↓ )

Final Fantasy XIV - 28 ( 129 ↓ )

Still a small tumble going on with a few games. To be expected.

It is quite clear that Rift has some great numbers, and they are not falling yet. I kept the Open Beta numbers as comparison this week, as previous X-Fire stats were still not tracking Rift data properly. Luckily, the issue has been fixed, and we can start getting a better compare for the coming months. But, it is pretty clear that having a higher set of numbers for launch compared to an open beta says a lot. Time will tell if this holds though.

Lord of the Rings and Aion both have continued to see a drop. But, EvE Online was back up this week and taking back the number two spot.

Star Trek and Champions both fell this week, but still show up well here.

Shocking was the two big launch fail titles...Age of Conan and Warhammer Online... having some upward trending. AoC had a major update this past week and WAR also had a new patch. Whether this placebo will wear off...only time will tell.

Now, please don't look at FFXIV badly here. Due to the disaster in Japan this past weekend, the servers felt major upheavals which have affected overall stats. I will keep an eye on this, and lets hope it is not a permanent down. (UPDATE: As no one understands the wording of my sentence...by "permanent down" I mean the numbers for players...not the servers themselves. I know they have a planned outage, but seems not everyone understands what I am saying here. I hope that AFTER the servers are back online that these numbers will go up. But, based on the fact that this particular game is not doing well, I expect this to be a hard hit, and may stay down quite a bit).

As to the big drop for DC Universe? Yea, I expected that. I have stated many times that the Fantasy genre owns the MMO world, and superhero games just do not have the staying power of elves, dwarves and magic. I hope another game...say The Secret World...can finally push this genre into other realms of enjoyment.

...

Rift - 4015 ( 3856↑ ) players

EvE Online - 1092 ( 1006 ↑)

Lord of the Rings Online - 918 ( 993 ↓ )

Aion - 535 ( 508↑ )

Champions Online - 293 ( 485 ↓ )

DC Universe - 203 ( 338↓ )

Dungeons & Dragons Online - 258 ( 285 ↓ )

Star Trek Online- 100 (171 ↓ )

Age of Conan - 99 ( 84 ↑ )

Warhammer Online - 85 ( 65 ↑ )

Final Fantasy XIV - 35 ( 178↓ )

Rift still holding out for #1. As well, adding a few players in the process. Continuing to impress here.

Champions tumbles, DC Universe drops. Both took major falls. Star Trek also felt the bruises of getting slapped around.

Age of Conan and WAR both exhibit the Vicodin high associated with new patches. Now, can the players keep popping the pills?

And of course, my prayers with the people of Japan, and sadness for the FFXIV fall.

...

As announced last week, World of Warcraft is our game of the week for the next 30 days of Rift-mania. Lets see how WoW charted.

WoW = Xfire 36510 ( 36972 players ↓ )

WoW continued to tumble. Now, we must note that due to the Japan disaster, the shock-waves could be felt in WoW as well. So, whether this is Rift oriented...hard to say. We will continue to watch these numbers and see if next week fixes the problems.
...

As a final add here, I wanted to report on the new "charts" system for Rift I am tracking (you can read about this more...HERE).

As I have noted from previous X-Fire games...Sunday is the busiest day of the week for MMO's. So, here are yesterdays charts for Rift.

German schedule - 7PM

USA EST schedule 7:45 PM

I tried to grab the charts when I could (hey, I was playing Rift, DAMMIT)...but, I think we have a pretty clear picture of how things are looking here.

Germany's prime time really shows some full servers and quite a few high's as well. ZERO lows here. And looking at those charts and seeing that none of the US servers are low either, really says a lot.

When we switch to US based servers and schedules, we still have 6 servers with queues, a majority are at high, and there are even medium servers with no lows...things are looking good.

Now, this will be the last set of these charts I will post until after the 30 days are up. I want to see how many servers stay at least semi-full or even queue'd after that time limit.

***

Whew...lots going on here. I am really excited for the next few months of charts and X-Fire/Raptr data. Stay tuned, as this roller-coaster has just started.

6 comments:

@DinkYou kinda remind me of all those people who said "Age of Conan will close by the end of the year" or "Aion is a complete failure and will close by the end of the year" or "Warhammer Online is a big fail...it will close by the end of the year"

Aw hell...even Vanguard is still up and running and it is the biggest of failures (even moreso than the games that have already closed like Tabula Rasa)...

I am gonna call your prediction wrong. I won't disagree with the fact the game will be "smaller"...but, I think this one will hold up.

I think that you underestimate the staying power of Rift. By the time GW2 comes out, many people will have invested a lot of time into their characters in Rift. If Trion can avoid the Cataclysm scenario (a lot of people got fed up with WoW due to the expansion and therefore it made it easier for them to switch games), they will take a hit from GW2 but not as big as you seem to imply.